Bound By Sin And Blood

Alaric -Fragment and Essence

Darkness.

It felt thick and

tangible. It wasn't the kind that comes when you close your eyes, nor was it

similar to when you are left in a room devoid of light. This one felt eerie. It

seemed like it was deliberately imposed by something.

For a moment then, I wondered if this was what death truly

looked like. It was just an eerie silence that settled around me. I couldn't

move, neither could I speak. I couldn't even move my body.

Ahhh… I remember clearly

now. I had died when that being lunged at me and bit into my neck. My sad life

had just come to an end. Mother's gone, father's gone, Avelina ?

I wanted to feel the rage wash over me like a tide, but

that's the thing. I couldn't.

At first, the darkness remained empty. Then something slowly

appeared. It shimmered, or was it my mind? Ahhh....., I remember. I don't have

a mind. I'm dead.

It was a single star. It twinkled faintly in the distance.

That single star became two. It became three.

Ahhh..... this can't be my mind.

Soon, the darkness was no longer empty. It was filled with

stars scattered across the endless void until it looked like a vast night sky

stretching above me. I couldn't turn my head to look around. I had no sense of

a body at all. Yet my vision remained fixed on that sky.

And then the sky changed.

A fierce gust of dust and wind rushed upon me. I definitely

would have been thrown off wherever I was if I had a mortal body. But here I

was, feeling it pass through me.

Beyond the cloud of dust, I noticed movement. There seemed

to be two figures causing this wind. In between the rising and falling gusts,

with debris flying out everywhere, I tried to see the figures, but it wasn't

easy, since they were both in constant motion.

In my curiosity, I ended up feeling a pang of pain as I

looked. The pain was nonstop, flaring through my non‑existent

self. The sight I beheld was definitely not right. Fear washed over me like a

tide, like I was looking into the eyes of a demon. I could feel what was left

of my existence slowly coming undone.

And I could not help but think of the fate of my mortal body

if it was still here.

I could not explain to myself what I was seeing, but the

first figure to stop in the middle of their clash reminded me of those humans,whatever

they were,that ambushed us on the way to the circus.

It… he… looked so ancient, and his presence was what struck

me the most.

Revolting is the only term I could use, because he possessed

a certain beauty that made my hairs stand on edge and filled my senses. He was

laughing, coughing up blood on the ground with a mischievous smile on his face,

and two long chipped, dangling canines, looking at his opponent even though it

seemed he was the one at the disadvantage.

There was a deep gashing wound on his back that disgustingly

was attempting to heal, but something seemed to make it fail. It was caught in

a weird loop of healing and unhealing, squirting massive amounts of blood that

stained both his once‑beautiful toga and the ground below.

He was in a great deal of pain, that I could tell, despite

his facade.

"Hellsing," he said, "you know what I admire about you?" He

smiled. "The obsession. Very human."

His opponent was a tall, broad man clad in what once was

armor, now just a few pieces of iron that seemed enchanted. Avelina had always told me stories about fairies and

enchanted objects they used, even though I hadn't actually seen them. I could

tell these were similar, with how the rune symbols seemed to glow occasionally

and some distant chanting I could hear from far beyond the mountains resonating

in tune with their glow.

He had gore‑filled bite marks on his body,

some stabbing through his chest, into the charms that hung on his body, and

into his flesh. He had four of his ribs sticking out of his side and squirting

out blood. His injuries were definitely not inferior to the other's, only that

he seemed to be the one dominating.

He didn't reply to the other's sly play, but rather began

chanting under his breath.

The one on the ground coughed yet another mouthful of blood.

"Tell me, Hellsing, if your God wanted me gone, why use

you?"

He attempted to get up from the ground again, but his arms

gave way. Then he was helpless, yet still smiling.

His talk seemed to have provoked his opponent, because at

the mention of his God, he stopped his muttering and responded.

"Because someone had to, Dracula," he said, or so it seemed

to me.

With a reflex so fast I could hardly see, he lunged at

Dracula and sent his sword‑looking charm into his chest

without a thought, which went right through him.

Dracula remained crouching there, seemingly unaware that

something had gone through him, still smiling with gore escaping from his back

and blood pouring from both his nostrils and ears, which seemed faster this

time.

Through his calm, I saw it.

As he looked directly at Hellsing in the eyes with such

familiarity I would have mistaken for that between brothers, I noticed,even

before Hellsing lunged at him,a subtle wrongness in his smile and the slow but

gradual formation of something small, like an orb, or rather a tiny fragment.

Just as the sword pierced his chest, the fragment slipped,

tiny and unseen, from his back and into the darkness, totally unnoticeable by

Hellsing himself.

"You'll regr-"

Those were the last words that came from his mouth before he

dropped totally onto the ground, turning stiff, and his body became like clay.

I was trembling under the influence of the pain I tried so

hard to bear and the understanding of what only I seemed to have known. I could

notice a faint trace of understanding from Hellsing as well. But before I could

discern if he truly knew, I found myself observing something else.

I could still see the fragment moving fast,so fast, in fact,

that it was like a rat escaping a slaughterhouse. It was accompanied by a trail

of its own essence, though I could not discern what color it was.

My eyes, if I had any, seemed to open to a terrible

realization of where it was heading.

Trailing past me, the fragment and its essence suddenly separated,

and I noticed the fragment trailing of into the darkness but I couldn't tell

where it went, because at that moment, even though I seemed to have been unnoticed by

both fighters and the world as a whole, it's essence penetrated through my very

being.

And I could feel the total wrongness of that process.

Pain reverberated into every part of me, and I felt myself

in a loop of shattering into a thousand pieces and being assembled again, brick

by brick, with the process lasting forever, and I still felt incomplete.

In the pain that I could neither endure nor die from, the

darkness and everything dissolved into distant variations of imaginations I

never seemed to have had.

And then I could feel the light again.

The light?

It was the sun.

My vision was blurry and hazy at first, but I could hear

birds chirping so loudly that the sounds came too randomly and crashed into my

ears in an unfiltered ringing.

Opening my eyes, I looked directly at the sun and screamed

in a frenzy, sitting up and looking at myself.

I noticed I was in a sewage disposal in the middle of

nowhere.

No, it was actually somewhere, or rather the outskirts of a

town from the looks of the distance. It wasn't my town, though.

"I'm alive!!" I cried out, and frantically began digging

desperately through the waste with the hope that something lost could be found.

"Mother?? Avelina ??" I screamed, panting.

But the only response I got was the echo of my own voice.

"Father??"

I said that last before soaking myself in my tears.

My body felt wrong. I couldn't explain it, but I felt

incomplete somehow, with my mind drifting back to the illusion I saw and the

reality of what it did to me.

I had a certain high amount of vitality, and I felt

stronger. My eyes felt… well, my eyes and senses were altered.

I didn't know how, but I could hear different ringings that

seemed to come from far away, with my eyes adjusting and giving me a certain

type of view that I could not fully explain with words.

In my tears about the reality of my family, my temper flew

up into a rage.

It was in that rage that I suddenly grew longer canines,

similar to those Dracula had.

I really didn't know what else had changed.

Cleaning my tears, I stood up, drenched in sewage and oozing

filth, left to rot outside of an unfamiliar town with a certain realization.

I was the only person in my family to have survived.

I was revitalized without feeling the stress of the ambush.

All of my wounds were healed, and I had been transformed into something

strange.

In all this, I felt incomplete, like my completion had been

left somewhere far away.

My mind wandered again, and I realized the truth.

Leaving the sewage, I soberly headed toward the town with my

rage nestling and kindling within me.